The Pastor's Wife

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

The street was asleep, empty that fine afternoon, the inhabitants away at work in the fields, and only the pig and the geese were visible in the parsonage yard. Luckily the gate in the wire-netting fence that shut off the house and garden was not latched, for she could not have opened it, but would have stood there holding on to it and foolishly sobbing till some one came and helped. The least obstacle now would be a thing that in no way could be got over. The front door was shut, and sooner than go up the steps and try to get it open, she went round the path to the side of the house where the lilacs grew and Robert's window was. That way she could reach the kitchen, whose door stood always open and was level with the garden. Robert would be out in his fields. She would go into his laboratory and wait for him. Nobody but Robert knew yet. She had come back before the end of her leave. His shame was not yet public property. If he just beat her, she thought, in a disinterested weak way, and there was an end of it, wouldn't that do? Then no one need ever know, and he could stay on in Kökensee and go on with his work, and she wouldn't have ruined him. It was the thought of having ruined Robert that clove her heart in two. To have ruined him, when all her ambition and all her hope had been to make him so happy....

Well did she know that a pastor whose wife had broken the seventh commandment would be driven out, would be impossibly scandalous in any parish. And her not having broken it was quite beside the point; it didn't matter what you didn't do so long as you looked as though you had done it. And if Robert killed her it wouldn't help him, either; he would have done the only decent thing, as the Baroness and her son Hildebrand had said that time long ago, and avenged his honour in the proper German way, but there were drawbacks to avenging one's honour—one was, illogically, punished for doing it, and even though it were mild punishment, any punishment ended a pastor's career.

She crept round the corner of the house. She was so tired that if she had to wait for him long in his laboratory she felt sure she wouldn't be able to keep awake. Well, if he came in and killed her while she was asleep it would be for her the pleasantest thing; she was so very tired that it would be nice, she thought vaguely, to wake up afterwards, and find oneself comfortably dead. But Robert was not in his fields. From the path beneath his window she could see his head, as she had seen it hundreds of times, bending over his desk.

At the sight she stopped, and her heart seemed to shrink into quite a little, scarcely beating thing. There he was, her dishonoured husband, the being who in her life had been kindest to her, had loved her most, still working, still going on doggedly among the ruins she had created, up to the last moment when public opinion, brutal and stupid, making her the chief thing when she so utterly was not, while it thrust her and her wishes and intimate knowledge aside as not mattering when, as in the question of more children, or no more children, they so utterly did, would on her sole account, on the sole account of what seemed to her at that moment the most profoundly naturally unimportant thing in life, a woman who had been silly, put a stop to his fine work and refuse to give the world a chance to profit by his brains.

Well, she couldn't think about that now. She couldn't hold on to any of her thoughts for more than an instant. She only knew that the moment had come for facing him, and that she was very tired. She really was extraordinarily tired. Her mind was just as dim and reluctant to move as her body. Whatever Robert was going to do to her she would cling to him with her arms round his neck while he did it. She was so tired that she thought if he didn't mind her just putting her arms round his neck she would very likely go to sleep while he beat her. But poor Robert, she thought—how hot it was going to make him to have to be violent, to have to beat! It was not at all good beating weather.... And it was almost a pity to waste punishment on somebody too tired to be able properly to appreciate it, to take it, as it were, properly in.

She moved along down the path towards the back door. When one came to think of it it was a strange thing to be going in to Robert to be hurt. Well, but she had deserved it; she perfectly understood about his honour and its needs. Oh, yes, she perfectly understood that. A man has to—what had she just been going to think? What does a man have to? Oh, well. If only what he did to her could blot out every consequence of what she had done to him, be a full, perfect, and sufficient—no, that was profane; tiresome how one thought in the phrases of the Prayer-book and how difficult it was if one had had much to do with prayer-books not to be profane. As it was, her punishment wouldn't do anybody any good that she could see. Funny, the punishment idea. Of what use was it really? The consequences of the things one did were surely enough in their devastating effect; why increase devastation? And forgiveness didn't seem to be of much use, either. It blotted out the past, she had heard people in pulpits say, but it didn't blot out the future, that daily living among consequences which she perceived was going to be so dreadful.

Well, she couldn't think now. And here was the kitchen door; and here—yes, wasn't that Klara, staring at her open-mouthed, arrested in the middle of emptying a bucket? Why did she stare at her? Did she then know?

"Allmächtiger Gott" exclaimed Klara, dropping the bucket.

Yes, evidently Klara knew, she thought, dragging her dusty feet across the kitchen into the passage, and allmächtiger Gott was what one said in Germany when one's disgraced mistress came back, instead of guten Tag. Well, it didn't matter. The dark little passage; one almost had to grope one's way along it when the front door was shut. And it had not been aired apparently since she went away, and it was heavy and choked with kitchen smell. She supposed it must be this thickness of atmosphere that made her, on Robert's doormat with her hand on the latch, feel suddenly so very like fainting. And it really was dark; surely it didn't only seem dark because she suddenly couldn't see? Alarmed, she remembered how she had fainted after her conscience-stricken journey back from Lucerne. Was she then to go through life making at intervals conscience-stricken journeys back, and fainting at the critical moment at their end?

In terror lest she should do it now if she waited a moment longer, and so twist things round in that dishonourable womanly way which commits the wrong and then bringing in the appeal of bodily weakness secures the comforting, secures, almost, the apology, she seized all her courage, swept its fragments together into a firm clutching, and opened the door.